Tag: Timor Mortis

Une oeuvre au diapason…

Auteur postmoderne mêlant réalisme et fiction, humour et sérieux, le mot et l’image, les facettes de Lodge sont multiples, s’accordent… Tout comme les reflets du miroir qu’il tend à la réalité. Écrivain conscient des outils qu’il utilise, Lodge a en effet toujours mêlé critique littéraire et littérature critique, l’art du divertissement et le divertissement artistique. Le genre du « roman universitaire », caractérisant nombre de ses fictions, permettant d’ailleurs facilement le jeu entre théorie et pratique fictionnelle. La Vie en sourdine*, roman paru en 2008, ne fait pas exception, bien qu’il puisse presque être qualifié de « post-universitaire », selon Toby Lichtig1, puisque le protagoniste est cette fois un professeur à la retraite.

Sous plus d’un aspect, La Vie en sourdine renoue sans conteste avec des traits caractéristiques de la trilogie de Rummidge (pendant fictif de Birmingham)

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“Deafinitely Lodgean…”

An interview with David Lodge

by Sophie GABEREL-PAYEN

David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence (published in May 2008), is about ageing, deafness and death. It is also deeply touching, more “seriously funny” than ever, even though the author, a well-known novelist and literary critic, has his own usual way of dealing with those very serious themes, mixing up humour with what he has always been interested in: the fate of the human lot, religion and literature.
This novel bears the same characteristics as the novelist’s brilliant Rummidge campus trilogy or Thinks (2001), another academic novel located in Gloucester.Yet, this time, the story is set in an unnamed Northern town where the protagonist, Desmond Bates, a professor of linguistics who retired early, struggles with a predictable life he describes in his journal, his wife, Winifred, who is eight years younger and Mr Bates, his 89-year-old father, who refuses to leave his house until he is overtaken by illness and death – a comic and moving portrait of the father figure recalling that of Mr Wilcox in Nice Work (1988) or Mr Walsh in Paradise News (1991). The reader cannot therefore help smiling at the dramatic irony implied by Desmond’s remark while talking to his former colleague, Colin Butterworth: “It wouldn’t surprise me if we both turn up lightly disguised in a campus novel one of these days” (Lodge 2008a, 286). “Post-campus” might even be a better definition according to some critics (Lichtig 2008, 22), though this is a term that does not entirely satisfy the writer.

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